Data storage has become an integral part of everyday life. For example, a user may obtain a variety of data from over a network, such as songs, email, web logs (i.e., “blogs”), movies, web pages, and so on. Additionally, the user may share this variety of data with other users, such as by providing a web page that is accessible by other users of the Internet, communicating the data during an instant messaging session, attaching the data to an email, and so forth. Further, the types of data which are available to the user are ever increasing, from photos and textual descriptions to downloadable movies and songs.
To provide this data to a plurality of such users, a service provider may provide online data storage. For example, a user may purchase a portion of the available online data storage from the service provider to store emails and so on. Accordingly, the service provider may provide a multitude of such portions to a multitude of users. Therefore, the service provider may be faced with a daunting task of managing a significant amount of data storage for the multitude of users. Further, the service provider may be faced with managing the different portions of the data storage for use by different respective clients.
Therefore, there is a continuing need for improved techniques for managing data storage.